When comparing Express.js vs Laravel 5, the Slant community recommends Express.js for most people. In the question“What are the best backend web frameworks?”Express.js is ranked 4th while Laravel 5 is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Express.js is:

Express' extremely powerful routing API allows developers to do tasks ranging from building a REST API to building the routes for a simple web app and then take it to the next level by using route parameters and query strings.

Pros

Pro

Great routing API

Express' extremely powerful routing API allows developers to do tasks ranging from building a REST API to building the routes for a simple web app and then take it to the next level by using route parameters and query strings.

Pro

Great for beginner Node.js programmers

With a little learning curve, it is a good choice for new NodeJS developers to get started quickly. Express boasts great, thorough documentation.

Pro

Support for a lot of plugins

Express takes advantage of Node's NPM to distribute and install countless plugins made by third parties which solve almost anything a developer would want to do with Express.

Pro

Relatively mature

Being a somewhat old Node.js web app framework and being one of the most widely used frameworks, Express.js has matured quite a lot during all that time. It's more stable than its competitors and a huge community backing it.

Pro

Has the largest userbase

It's by far the most popular framework for node.

Pro

Setting up is very easy

Setting up a new Express project is very easy. It consists of installing a handful of libraries through NPM run a single npm install and everything is ready to go.

Pro

Great supportive community

Express has a big community with a lot of guides and tutorials written about it by developers that have been using it for quite some time.

Pro

Has detailed information

Pro

Express.js is in the Node.js Foundation Incubator Program

The Node.js Foundation is a Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation. Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects are independently funded software projects that harness the power of collaborative development to fuel innovation across industries and ecosystems.

Pro

Lightweight

Pro

Massive ecosystem of Middleware

If you have not already checked out the Express.js ecosystem of middleware, you should.

Pro

Comes with its own CLI

Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more.

Pro

Good documentation

Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike.

Pro

Comes with an excellent built-in ORM

Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box.

Pro

Good for building RESTful APIs

With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours.

Pro

Easy to write web apps with authentication

Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt.

Pro

Handles event queuing

Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run:

This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher.

Pro

Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure

Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish.

Pro

Can use Symfony components

Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved.

Pro

Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir

In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported.

Pro

Extremely powerful template system

Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made.

Pro

Easy to learn

Cons

Con

No single recommended way of doing something

Express considers itself to be a "minimalistic unopinionated framework", it basically lets the developer determine how their project will be organized. On one hand, this gives anyone terrific power and flexibility to use any library they want for a certain task and to organize their project structure however they want. But on the other hand, there's no single recommended way of organizing things, which can be a trap for beginners and experienced developers alike and result in unmaintainable projects.

Con

Bloated

While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development.

Con

Uses too much magic methods

It complicates debugging and autocompletion.

Con

Hard to use model properties

You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually.

Con

Not really suited for enterprise development

Laravel is great for putting a blog together quickly, but it does not really pack all the features for a full enterprise grade website.

Con

Steep learning curve

While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated.